Is hiding paid backlinks from Google actually possible?

Your website’s link profile is basically one of your biggest areas of concern. Given the kind of penalties levied by Google for any misconduct related to your link profile, the concern is well-justified. The truth is that link profile building is a time-consuming activity that requires judicious decisions; especially when you are pondering over the thought of buying backlinks for your own website.

However, a report also talks about how a sample of 750,000 well-shared articles over 50% had zero external links. This points to the widespread shallow SEO knowledge where website owners don’t care enough to build and earn links for their website. And sometimes the ones who are doing well don’t necessarily care about ethics.

A lot of website owners struggle with their site’s Search Engine Optimization due to several reasons. Since backlinks are a quick and efficient way of spiking your site’s traffic and ranking, many of them resort to adopting unethical ways of getting these backlinks i.e. buying them or exchanging them for other digital favors.

The question is, does it actually work? Can you really fool the Google Algorithms? Will your website be ever penalized for it? If you always had these questions in your mind, this blog post will help you explore it all and better understand if or not you can keep Google from knowing that you are buying links to enhance your site’s SEO.

A basic backdrop on backlinks

If you are new to website building or SEO, you might ask, ‘What is a backlink?’ Well, a backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website. Having these backlinks on a website increases the credibility of the website as well as the business related to it. Backlinks from quality sites that have a high authoritative value can have an added advantage for your website. There is a whole lot of theory behind the use of the right backlink practices and before you get there, you need to know how a paid link can affect your website.

What are paid/bought links vs. earned links?

An ideal link profile is one that features earned backlinks rather than paid ones. These earned backlinks happen when other websites and blogs find your website’s content to be genuinely interesting and useful and they choose to add them as a backlink. However, some website owners have relied on the arrangement of buying and selling links in order to survive the tough SEO war.

Paid link building is when a website pays a third party domain for a followed backlink that points back to their domain. This is strictly forbidden by search engines and can result in harsh penalties. It can benefit your website for a very short period, but it is never there to stay. Hence, your website should stay away from such unethical practices because sooner or later your website will get penalized for indulging in such misconduct.

A rightfully-earned backlink contributes to making websites more resourceful and easy for the online audience, instead of poaching SEO ranks. These earned backlinks point to content that is likable, resourceful, and qualified. Only when your website offers relevant and high-quality content, other websites want to point out to that. Yes, that is a lot of work and that is why most of the website owners try taking a shorter path i.e. paid links.

Will you really be able to hide from Google that you are buying links?

Some website owners and inexperienced SEO enthusiasts function with an opinion that they are smarter than Google or that ” how would Google ever know” that they are buying links. What they seem to underestimate is the fact that the Google’s reach and ability to mine and interpret data is far outreached than our comprehension. If you think that using a dedicated IP VPN such as PureVPN can help you hide the traces, that is debatable.

When these irresponsible website owners sport these paid links on their website, they forget that they always create a pattern, no matter how hard they try to avoid creating one. Patterns such as excessively sharing links that belong to another domain/industry that has nothing to do with their own industry or targeting websites that indulge in such excessive link building activities help Google to flag the culprits.

For people who think that they can outsmart the algorithms, they may be right. However, they also underestimate the human/manual review team of Google that can one day take their website for a roll and end up penalizing it heavily for such paid link building activity. It is always either an algorithm report, a tip-off by a competitor, or a manual team member’s action which is going to take down such websites. So, there’s no escape.

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Why paid links don’t work at all?

The answer is short, loud, and clear. Paid links don’t work in the long run because they are unnatural, irrelevant, and deceptive; enough to get your website penalized.

By now, we hope that we have managed to throw enough light on the topic of the super bad paid links and on the good guys that earned backlinks are. Now that you know, here are some Bonus link-building tips:

Check out your website’s Authority with the help of Website Authority Checker. The tool will help you understand and check the authority of a website to give you an outlook on how a website can perform in Google.

Always focus on the quality of backlinks that you accept for your website rather than the number of backlinks.

It is important to make sure that you are not receiving backlinks from low-quality websites. They hamper your site’s chances of ranking well.

Guest posts are probably a great way of getting backlinks in exchange for good blog content. However, don’t play around with this one because you will always end up getting caught.

Broken links are not an issue to be ignored. They lead to a poor user experience and make it difficult for search engines to efficiently crawl and index websites. So, fix them as soon as you figure them out.

Conclusion

Link building is a wide topic to reckon with because it is 2018 and the website ranks make up for a good competition. Even if your website is struggling to stay ahead and make a mark, never fall into the unethical practices of paid links or other black hat SEO techniques. They are always figured out by Google and that can do a lot of harm to the reputation of your website.

With the right backlinking practices, you will be able to win over the other marketers only because you will know how to implement advanced link building techniques in the most ethical way. The progress might be slow but all your efforts will be worth the wait when your site’s search engine ranking improves.